The present invention relates to a boundary display device used in a photographic printer which makes a plurality of enlarged partial prints from one image frame on a developed photographic film.
There has been proposed a method of division-printing in which instead of making a single greatly-enlarged print from an original image on the developed photographic film, a plurality of enlarged partial prints are made from the original image and thereafter arranged, according to their corresponding positions of the original image, on a display panel or sheet to display a large composite picture (for example, U.S. patent application. Ser. No. 169,790). This large composite picture display has the effect as if the partial prints arranged in this way were a single greatly-enlarged print, resulting in reduced printing costs in comparison with making the single greatly-enlarged print. The developed photographic film for making the partial prints was then returned to the customer from a photofinishing laboratory together with prints produced from the film in the form of several film strips and again sent to the photofinishing laboratory to make partial prints for the film frames specified by the customer. When the partial prints are then made, a film strip held in a film carrier of the printer is two-dimensionally shifted in a plane perpendicular to the printing optical axis of the printer to nominally divide the image frame of the film strip.
In this method, however, it is impossible to know prior to the division-printing how a scene of an image frame is divided. Hence, an undesirable large composite picture is sometimes produced. For example, a person's eye in a portrait may be separately printed on two or four partial prints adjacent to one another. In this case, a line or lines may run through the person's eye when the partial prints are arranged without space between adjacent partial prints, or the person's eye is separated into two parts on two adjacent partial prints when they are arranged with some space therebetween.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a boundary display device which makes it possible to view, prior to division printing, how the scene of an image frame will be divided.